Creating Custom Flash Buttons

With Flash Objects,
introduced in Dreamweaver 4, Macromedia brought together two of its most powerful technologies. True to their underlying philosophy of extensibility, the Dreamweaver engineers provided an architecture for addressing Flash rather than just a feature. The implementation of Flash Objects included Flash Text and Flash Buttons; however, the architecture is capable of much more. One company, WebAssist (www.webassist.com), exploited this functionality to develop a commercial extension, Flash Charts, in several variations.

All Flash Objects are based on Generator templates that are created in Flash 5. Dreamweaver uses the templates—recognizable by their .swt file extension—to create new Flash movies that use the .swf extension. The Generator templates have variables embedded in the Flash movies, such as {Button Font}. These variables are replaced by user-specified values when a Flash Object is inserted into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver includes a fair number of Flash Buttons and Flash Text objects in the standard version of the program, and numerous other Flash Button collections are available on the Dreamweaver Exchange. Although these examples work fine, a custom-tailored solution is required occasionally, and clip-art—no matter how well executed—is not acceptable. Such custom
Flash Objects—Flash Buttons and Flash Text—are created in Flash 5 with the aid of the Generator Authoring Extensions.